Linux 7.0-rc2 came out on March 1st. The stable release should land in mid-April. The 7.0 number sounds significant, but Linus Torvalds immediately set expectations — the version bump is about readability, not an architectural revolution. The 6.x numbers were just getting too large.

That said — there are plenty of changes, and several are genuinely important.

Rust Is No Longer an Experiment

Rust has had experimental status in the kernel for several years. In 7.0, that officially ended. Miguel Ojeda closed that chapter with a patch removing the “experimental” flag. Rust in the kernel is here to stay.

As of today, that’s ~25,000 lines of Rust against ~34 million lines of C. Nobody intends to rewrite the kernel — it’s about new drivers and modules where memory safety matters. LTO and Rust builds working together has also been improved.

Memory — Concrete Optimizations

MM subsystem changes are one of the stronger points of this release.

Compressed writeback for Zram — Zram previously wrote data to disk uncompressed. It now supports compressed writeback, saving CPU and power. Laptops should notice the difference.

Faster hugepages — page clearing during demand faulting for 2MB+ pages is now contiguous (clear_pages()), which works better with the hardware prefetcher. On AMD Zen, it switches to cacheline allocation elision for data exceeding LLC size — better bandwidth without evicting useful data from cache.

Gigantic folio allocation — allocating 120 × 1 GB folios dropped from 3.6s to 0.43s. Nearly 10x faster.

Unified swapin — swap code consolidation with legacy path removal. Redis benchmarks showed a 20% speedup.

PT_RECLAIM — extended to additional 64-bit architectures: Alpha, LoongArch, MIPS, Parisc.

Scheduler

Continuation of preemption model simplification — now down to two: PREEMPT_LAZY and PREEMPT_FULL. Four modes for modern architectures was too many. PREEMPT_LAZY is the sweet spot for typical workloads.

A time slice extension feature was also added, after a decade of development.

Filesystems

  • EXT4 — improved concurrent Direct I/O write performance
  • exFAT — faster sequential reads
  • F2FS — further optimizations
  • XFS — fixes in rc2
  • EROFS — fixes in rc2
  • SMB client — fixes in rc2
  • Old mount API removed from block code, replaced by newer OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE

Drivers and Hardware

CPU:

  • Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids — new enablement
  • AMD Zen 6 — performance events and metrics
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 — continued upstreaming

GPU:

  • AMD GFX 12.1 — new IP blocks
  • Intel Xe — multi-queue for Crescent Island, display support for Nova Lake
  • Nouveau — large pages restored, better NVK performance
  • Qualcomm — Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 display

Other:

  • Apple USB Type-C PHY
  • AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator fixes
  • Framework 13 — fan and temperature threshold controls
  • Sensor monitoring on additional ASUS motherboards
  • LG Gram Style 14 — speaker support
  • Focusrite Forte — USB audio interface
  • Intel TSX enabled by default on supported processors

Networking

CAKE_MQ — adaptation of SCH_CAKE (popular bandwidth management qdisc) for modern multi-core systems.

IO_uring IOPOLL improvements.

Removed

HIPPI — old networking standard (800 Mb/s - 6.4 Gb/s) from the 90s supercomputer era. Nobody has used it in years, it’s finally been removed.

An old Kconfig option generating log spam was also removed — patch by Torvalds himself.

When Does It Ship?

Stable Linux 7.0 should arrive around April 12-19, depending on the number of RCs. It will likely land in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44.

Sources: Phoronix, Phoronix — rc2, Phoronix — MM, Phoronix — Feature Preview